Most developers want to learn how to get better at programming so they can do their jobs better, working faster, using more efficient and modern methods.

Reading the latest PHP books is one of the ways developers can be better at PHP programming. A bestseller book is a book that sold many copies because it interested many readers.

This article presents a list of the bestseller books of the latest times, so you can not only know which are the most interesting books. Those books are often the bestsellers because they present the most upto date development methods and tools that you need to know to be inline with the latest trends that may get you better paid developer jobs.

Since the early days the PHP Classes has been publishing reviews of PHP books. Writing good book reviews is time consuming and not all reviewed books are interesting to every PHP developer. Reviewed books will eventually get old and lose interest.

Therefore instead of encouraging the submission of book reviews, from now on the site will publish this article that will keep a live ranking of the PHP bools published in the last two years.

This means that this article will be updated regularly, probably once a month, to consider books that have been published more recently and became best sellers and eventually delist older books that were not updated.

This list was built in collaboration with the respective publishers. For now only O'Reilly and Packt books are listed because as long time sponsors of the PHP Innovation Award, they have promptly expressed to collaborate in this initiative too.

I hope to also include books from LeanPub soon. There is a technical difficulty because LeanPub API does not provide a list of best seller PHP books. I may need to scrape the listing from their site pages.

If you have published PHP books via other publishers, the article may also include those books, specially if your books are listed in Amazon sites, as the listing was built with Amazon API for pulling the ranking information.

If that is the case, send a message to the contact page below to let us know about the books. Also let me know even if your book was published in other language besides English.

For now I am including books about generic PHP related topics. This is because I am contacting every author individually to collaborate in the article. Later I will include books about CMS systems like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, etc., as well about PHP Frameworks, like Laravel, Symfony, Zend, etc..

If you have written PHP books about these topics, please contact me so you can help rushing the update of this article.

Please post a comment about this article below for other questions, suggestions and criticisms.

Learning PHP 7 demonstrates how to script for the web, providing everything from simple PHP commands to advanced data manipulations.

This is done through the creation of a fun social web application where a viewer can post and share pictures including features of likes and comments.Important topics such as creating an API for an RSS feed, deploying with Docker and Amazon AWS, and versioning with Git are a real bonus for blooming web developers.

Why this book was written

This video course was created because w did not find a course which gives you something more than an "academic knowledge".

Our development background covers over a decade of working in a wide area of development stack building web applications for big companies across Europe. With this course we wanted to share what I've learned during my professional experience.

Intended audience

This course takes a low-level approach to begin with, introducing the fundamentals of the language before demonstrating the major advancements in the platform through the creation of a "social web application".

The book takes practical approach of solving problems and understanding data structure with lots of examples and analysis.

Focusing on PHP 7 features, the book is written for both beginners and experience developers in PHP.

The book finishes with an introduction to functional data structures using functional programming.

Why this book was written

There was no book for data structures and algorithms in PHP in the market until this book was published. There are some tutorials and online resources but not a full fledged book focusing on PHP. The book was written to fill this gap.

The examples and explanations are more focused on how to solve the problems in PHP, so that it connects the PHP developers with data structures and algorithms.

Intended audience

This book is targetted to beginners and intermediate developers.

Data structure and algorithms are important concepts for all sorts of programmers.

Design Patterns are common solutions to recurring problems in software design. This book seeks to demonstrate the implementation common Design Patterns using the modern features of PHP 7.

The topic of Design Patterns is presented against a backdrop of demonstrating the implementation of Extreme Programming practices, such as merciless refactoring and strong unit testing.

This book is not about quickly cobbling together a programming project that will fall apart months down the line. This book is about making your code resilient to the forces of change, so you can increase the speed at which you deliver business value.

Why this book was written

There was very little documentation on how Design Patterns could be implemented in modern PHP in line with Object-Oriented Programming.

The author is also passionate about increasing the quality of the PHP code that is produced. He started this book with the introductory chapter arguing that the phrase "good PHP developer" was not an oxymoron. This book seeks to prove that well written PHP code is possible and that it makes business sense to build it.

Intended audience

This book is recommended mainly to PHP developers who have started off on the wrong foot and now want to learn how to do Object Oriented Programming properly, or those struggling with a project which is covered in legacy code in need of inspiration on how to better code quality.

This book has already helped few engineering managers that told this book helped them manage their team better by providing them a more through understanding of what their teams development workflow should look like.

This book seeks to turn the intermediate PHP developer and turn them into an advanced one.

The functional paradigm encourages code reuse, simplifies testing, and results in code that is concise, easy to understand, and usually more maintainable. This book will demonstrate that PHP have all the necessary features to leverage most of functional techniques.

It starts with a gentle introduction and then moves on to more difficult subjects like Monad and parallelization. It also addresses using functional programming alongside common frameworks and architecturing a complete application.

Why this book was written

Functional programming has gained a lot of traction in the last years, as various big tech companies started using functional languages. It is however a topic that was barely approached in the PHP community.

This book is I meant to fix this gap by providing an easy, although complete, introduction to functional programming rooted in pragmatism and PHP best practices.

Intended audience

This book is targetted to anyone interested in functional programming.

Except for the most basic ones, each PHP concepts used throughout the book are explained so that anyone can benefit.

However it requires some time to fully understand, as most of the ideas presented in the book will probably be novel for the reader and might seem counterintuitive when first encountered.

Why this book was written

Reactive, asynchronous and functional programming has been getting increasingly popular recently.

While these topics are fairly well covered in other languages, for PHP this has always been an uncharted territory.

An easy and modern way to tackle this is to start using framework agnostic Reactive Extensions (Rx), a library that helps you leverage reactive programming and has been ported to any possible language already.

Intended audience

This book is intended for advanced programmers with solid knowledge of PHP who want to learn about reactive and asynchronous programming in PHP for CLI and the web.

This book is like a pocket guide with all the steps you need to follow when you are creating a scalable and distributed application in PHP.

To achieve this we use microservices, so the book looks at setting up your developing machine to deploy to the cloud, going through design patterns, security, testing, monitoring, etc..

Why this book was written

Microservices have become increasingly popular in the last few years. Prior to the publication of this book we were unable to find a book that covered how to work with microservices using PHP language and the latest technologies such as Docker, GIT, ContainerPilot or Consul.

Intended audience

We think that this book is suitable for any kind of PHP developer, however it will probably be more interesting and useful for developers who are dealing with legacy and monolith code and for those who want to build something scalable and distributed from scratch.

If they have little experience dealing with this kind of project, we hope that this book will guide them on their paths to creating a successful project.

The book gives readers different options to use in their projects. For example when we talk about deploying, we explain how you can deploy your project to a Docker Swarm or as a commercial alternative, or how you can easily deploy to Joyents Triton.